Rainbow Table Optimization for Password Recovery

Abstract—As users become increasingly aware of the need to adopt strong password, it also brings challenges to digital forensics investigators due to the password protection of potential evidence data. In this paper, we discuss existing password recovery methods and present a design of a time-memory trade-off pre-computed table coupled with a new sorting algorithm. We also propose 2 new storage methods and evaluated their performance based on storage conservation and success rate improvement. Considering both alpha-numeric passwords and passwords consisting of any printable ASCII character, we show that we are able to optimize the rainbow table performance through an improvement of up to 26.13 % in terms of password recovery success rate, and an improvement of up to 28.57 % in terms of storage conservation, compared to the original rainbow tables